


Detox.

by TheUncreativeBox



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Angst, Drugs, F/M, Fallen Hero: Retribution Spoilers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Pre-Relationship, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:15:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27690557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheUncreativeBox/pseuds/TheUncreativeBox
Summary: Ortega takes a shot at getting off painkillers, but sometimes you can't go through the hard parts alone.
Relationships: Julia Ortega & Sidestep, Julia Ortega/Sidestep, Ortega & Sidestep (Fallen Hero), Ortega/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	Detox.

**Author's Note:**

> Featured Sidestep; Tobias Avery.

The leftover smell of puke permeates through the room, mixing with the fading remains of electrical fire. Slowly seeping in strands through the open windows. Smears of black smoke stain the wall beyond repair, the TV in shattered fragments he’s already painstakingly picked out of the living room rug.

Safety. Nothing else matters. Pulling Ortega’s apartment together a piece at a time, making it look like home enough again.

He has been dumping pills down the garbage disposal for the better part of fifteen minutes. Half of them hiding in epilepsy medication bottles, the other half places no one would check. Scared of finding more.

His fingertips still remember the grooves carved on the shiny surface. Too smooth against his fingertips as his thumb glides across. 

Tossed down the drain before the memory of cotton can solidify around his gums.

The disposal’s quiet hum occupies the space in his mind that his thoughts usually take up, the grind and the nostalgic taste of dust accompanying him in the otherwise empty room.

Static, buzzing right at the base of his skull. A lighthouse in the middle of the ocean and him a floating body across the waves, wary that at any moment it could go out. A focus other than his shaking hands or the dryness in his throat. The en-suite’s door ajar, beckoning him.

No doctors, she had been firm about that. It’s a decision that’s left him queasy, but he’s smart enough to know now isn’t the time to take a shot at talking her into it. Patient enough.

He dreads having left her alone all the same.

His mouth is a tense line as he reaches the foot of the door, shoulder pressed against the wall, hoping the chipped paint might turn into teeth and swallow him. Studying the dimly lit room and stalling.

The afternoon light paints her bedroom in colours too soft for the heaviness on his chest, the shut bedroom door trapping the scent of fabric softener inside her clean sheets, the room a bubble where he’s allowing nothing to be wrong.

His knock on the bathroom door an echo vibrating through his knuckles. “You okay?” The dull pain shaking numbness off. “You’re going to short circuit if you stay in the water for too long.”

No response. Not for a while, long enough to worry. Hand resting against the handle as he paints the image in his head. Limbs blue and unmoving, a fish in a bucket, eyes going milky faster than his stomach can sink.

“Julia?” he calls out again. His heart a hammer pulsing against his teeth, breaths barely reaching his lungs before he sucks them out again, slowly losing feeling in his face.

Dreadful waits are something he’s very intimate with. The difference is there’s nothing shackling him from bursting in now.

“Can…” Her voice breaks through the ringing in his ear in shallow notes. Out of his thoughts, fingers turning a yellowish white around the handle. “Can you come in?”

He allows himself a moment, enough to suck in a breath, the relief manifesting cracks in his throat all the same. “Are you sure?”

If she notices, she makes no show of it. “Please?”

Hesitant, he‘s a statue of a person standing just out of sight, at the doorframe. “Do you want me to bring you something to wear?” Give her some semblance of comfort, the worst thing she can see him as right now is an intruder to what’s left of her privacy.

“Just come.” There’s an uncharacteristic flatness to her tone that can’t quite put his finger on without an expression to match it to. An eerie quiet to it, something smothering her and forcing him to move.

The bathroom is musty, smelling of damp fabric and a trace of cleaning bleach, the bottle nonchalantly standing in the corner. Both of them paler under the hanging lights above the mirror, Ortega’s face beaded with sweat. Deep bruises on her knuckles, her mods inert, wallpaper to her skin.

The tile is deceptively cold through his jeans as he sits down, back pressed against the tub. He’s used to his spine taking unkindly to changes in temperature, enough to know to expect it. The pain burrows between his muscles, right where the screws touch flesh, waiting for a wrong move to let its first flare hit.

What if she needs help getting up? There’s no lifting her, just her mods would go double his weight on any scale.

Not that she knows about the condition of his body, the clothes hide the deformation around his waist well enough. It'll be a conversation to have if it gets to that, hopefully a brief one. Maybe she’ll even take no as an answer, like in a dream he had once.

“Are you okay?” He keeps his head down, eyes following the grout, a grid along the floor making everything feel a little less real. Rather just short of everything, there’s still a woman submerged behind him, her breaths heavy enough to be audible.

“No.” Remnants of tears in her voice, but he can tell she’s trying to push them down. Out of sight. His sight. “I keep—” Her huff is that of a bull’s about to break into a sprint. It doesn’t last.

A glance over his shoulder. Searching for the signs of aches jolting through her muscles. “Spine?”

The shrug not as nonchalant as he’s sure she meant it. Trying to hide the shaking. “Mostly.”

“Have you tried massaging the spot?” He remembers it used to help.

She only shakes her head.

“I… could? If you want me to.” His grimace reveals too much of how it’s not exactly his favourite idea in the world. Too intimate. “After we get you dressed.”

“There’s no need, it’s fine. I’m—” Sharp, grasping at straws to remember the person she usually is.

He chews his tongue, his stomach is folding on itself.

Smart to skip lunch today. Maybe dinner too. “Why don’t we just get you out of there to start?” Softer. Warm. Knowing the rise of her voice is inevitable.

Her snort sounds like there’s blood curling her throat more than it does laughter. “So I can puke all over myself again? Maybe piss the bed this time?”

“Then we deal with that then.” The firmness he usually wears replaced by poorly masked concern. Steady, he needs to be for both of them. “One thing at a time.”

“Or what, you’ll pity me harder?” The laugh hollow, words spat through grinding teeth, making him flinch hard enough that he thinks he might have cracked a tooth just from his jaw clenching. “You don’t have a clue what this is like.”

_“I—”_

“No. There’s no you. I’m the one who’s in pain, _me.”_

There’s an apology he almost speaks. It’d be easy to read into things, find some excuse to walk out. The door is begging for him to cross its threshold. She’s frightened and unused to this, so lashing out is easier.

They share that. The fear. Anger paints her differently.

It sticks to him like an itch even as he rolls up his right sleeve, icy fingers walking a death march. Thick scars, purposeful slashes, torn skin breaking up whatever remains of the tattoos on his arm.

The marks on the crook of his elbow posing as the centerpiece, the veins deep purple pathways tainting the tender skin.

“Mierda…”

“Needle broke here.” Unwavering where he didn’t expect himself to be. Tapping his finger over a spot, an attempt to take her attention back away from the rest of the slaughter. Is that even the right mark? “It was the last time I used.”

“Why…”

“Overdosed.” He pulls the sleeve back down, the rustle of fabric muffling the cussing she does under her breath.

There’s only fragments of a memory there, cheek rubbing against the motel’s carpeted floor, scent of cheap cleaners and old dirt, the owner yelling in the background. Going through his things, looking for cash?

“I don’t remember much,” he lies, “but I remember the paramedics.”

Latex gloves sticky against clammy skin, cold to the touch. Taking his second first breath as the Naloxone kicks in.

And then the thud of bodies hitting the floor, three eggs crashing against the pavement.

Their minds snuffed out like candle flames crushed inside his palm the moment he is lucid enough to realise what’s happening.

Frames in a movie reel, those moments have lost none of their clarity over the years. No dead reported, that much he knows, but it’s difficult to dig out information with no names attached to the glimpses of faces he caught.

There hasn’t been time to think about that in a long while. It always brings a sense of detached nausea with it, like he can’t possibly be that person, capable of doing worse.

The scar along Julia’s lip reminds him he’s come dangerously close.

There’s easier realisations to learn to live with.

“How long?” Ortega’s voice grounds him, her fingertips ghosts brushing against his back.

“How long what?”

“Have you been clean?” Finding the line of his spine, following it to a surgical scar she doesn’t know is there.

Tobias shakes her hand off before she reaches the snake-like curve it creates around his waist. Too many memories residing in the bone, never correctly mended. “Three and a half years. Roughly.”

“You never told me,” offended. More than she has any right to be.

“That makes two of us, then.” She’s not the one that found him doubled over on the apartment floor, next to a vomit puddle. He bites his tongue before he says something he regrets. Cruelty won’t help anything. “Don’t ask me to make you go through this alone.” He knows too much what that can be like. “Please?”

She’s quiet for a moment. One long enough that it has him thinking his words over, trying to spot where he tripped over them. Mental fingers trying to pull back the blanket around her mind enough to catch a peek of an answer. No purchase, as always. Sharing always leads to oversharing, he should learn to just shut his mouth.

“How did,” she’s not loud, but her voice comes like a clap next to his ear. Words brittle enough where she has to pause and clear her throat. “How did you get through it?” Silkier on the next try.

There’s a moment where he’s counting the tiles, looking for the right words in the lines that separate them. And then comes the crooked smile, bitterness spreading over his tongue like expired medication, watered down. He’ll learn to swallow it, eventually. “If I die now, they’ll find me.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“It does the job.” Most days.

The tap drips into her stagnant pool, a soft echo in the small room. She moves, the water sloshing around her, and he guesses a cramp from being still too lost. Another suggestion to leave the room dying between them.

“Help me wash my hair?” she pulls them both out of the silence before it settles between them.

He only catches the outline of her back, throwing her a look under lowered eyelashes. The silvery glint of her mods dulled down by the shadow he casts over her, the surrounding scars hugging them uncomfortably in place. “Of course.”

The ‘thank you’ mouthed before he even moves. 

She’s shivering in place, nail marks printed on her shoulders. Her knees pulled tighter against her chest, his digging into the heel of the bathtub, the grooves sure to leave their shape imprinted on his skin.

A knot in his chest making his breaths heavier. Turning his pulse into an ache.

He’s seen her at least partially naked before, wounds on her ribs or along her shoulder he was tasked with pulling together and seams along the inside of her thigh as she sat back and lounged. Watched his hands work.

Today her averted eyes say she wishes him to stop looking.

He pulls his sweater back again, eyes kept to the wall, the rug, the inscriptions on bottles he can’t read from so far away. Careful fingers comb through her hair, gently working through the less severe tangles.

“I cut mine.” The tap runs again, swirls of warmer water mixing with the stagnant remains in the tub. Gentle splashes against her back, washing the cold off her shoulders. “Took a pair of kitchen scissors and cropped it as short as I could.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Concern more than confusion.

“No.” He shakes his head a sluggish motion, afraid of scaring her if he moves too fast. “It was just impulse.”

“I can see you being cute with short hair.” Muffled, cheek resting against her forearm.

“I doubt it, it wasn’t even the same length all the way around.” Couldn’t get his hands to stop shaking, much like the tremble he’s trying to hide now.

It was a while before he looked in the mirror. Not because of the poor haircut. Too skinny to be as tall as he is, the clothes too big, too pale, too many bones making their shape known and his eyes colourless under the shadows of his sunken eyes. Not enough of it hiding under the hat and cheap coat as he passed by errant windows, the reflection wrong.

He still can’t quite recognise himself, even when he knows the face he’s peering into is his own.

“Tip your head back for me.”

His palm a pillow under her head. Slow movements, anything to make sure her spine isn’t aggravated, away from his own thoughts, back to thing he can actually help. Make better.

Warm water has always been healing to him. So unlike the oceans, controlled. Flavourless. The strands of her hair branches of a willow tree, coiling off his fingers as the water softens them.

“I’m not drowning you, right?” too mellow, throat coated in honey, thumb wiping the errant water over her eyes. Not thinking about how her eyelashes are soft against his fingertips.

“Pretend I’m faking some gargling noises.” A joke spoken without a smile, the nausea audible. She leans too much against him, melting under the heat and into his hands, but there’s a comfort to her weight. Knowing she’s still there.

“And here I thought I finally escaped your sense of humour.” Fake bemusement. Humouring her. Hoping that something he does might fix things. Something. Everything. Anything at all. His body’s phrasing of _‘It will be okay,’_ scattered in kisses along her shoulders in a lie never to be spoken.

“Was it because of us?” Eyes exhausted, not meeting his. The circles around them darker than usual. “You know I’d have been there if we _knew—”_

“No,” he cuts her off. “It was a personal choice.” A half-truth. No more her fault than it would have been if he told the entirety of it.

Part of experimenting after they got him back. Was it to see what kind of read he gave their machines or because it made him play nicer?

Could have stopped.

There’s a memory of being a blur in the water, fuzzy around the edges, his body a liquid circling down the drain. Into the ocean, a warmer one, breathable, a blanket keeping him trapped in place, same as being comfortable in bed on a chilly morning. Never wanting to get out.

There’s no regret, only guilt.

“Don’t blame yourself for it,” Tobias’ voice grows into a hush as he rinses the soap off her, the subtle mint of her shampoo sticking to his fingers. “I’m okay.”

She turns, cheek brushing against his palm. Her eyes fall to his bare forearms, following the long line down the center, sitting comfortably between the etched orange lines. “Don’t lie to me.”

The smile he gives her is a hollow performance. To be dropped again like a false face the moment one of them away. “Let’s get you out of here before you freeze.” Pulling himself together, his sleeves back in place. Hiding the parts of him he’s ashamed of.

“What happens when you don’t have to be afraid anymore?”

“Who says I ever won’t?” The chuckle dry self-deprecation.

“Me.” Her eyes closed while he returns with the towel. Nearing drowsiness, but he knows the peace won’t hold. “I am not letting them touch you again.”

“It’s not your burden.”

“It is. You need me.”

“I do.” Of course. Always. She blinks at him, something in the abyss that’s her eyes he can’t quite pick apart. “But this is mine to carry.”

There’s an absent grin, a smile he wishes for missing entirely. For a moment it’s just Ortega with none of the theatrics that make her herself. “I’ll be there.”

She won’t. He can’t let her. 

The room goes quiet as they reach the foot of an argument neither of them wants to indulge.

Ortega’s wrapped in her too expensive bathrobe, putting enough weight on him to bend him in half on a worse day, but he’ll mind when there’s time to.

“You never answered.” Breath heavy, her hair sticking to her neck.

The walk from the en-suite is longer than usual. “When did I sign that contract?”

She pulls herself straight despite the protests of her body. “I need to hear it.” Her edges sharper as she stares him down, the knot in her brow speaking less of determination and more of fear.

“I’m staying.” A promise he wishes wasn’t fake. Not when he knows he’ll be nothing but a coffin to her before the year ends.

Another bad memory to wash away.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed it please consider leaving a kudos or a comment. <3
> 
> You can also find this fic from me on tumblr under the handle theuncreativebox.


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